Freelance journalist and Independent political activist, open to offers in both capacities. Contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Accepts PayPal.

Sunday, 9 October 2016

Overall Control

No one is a Labour parliamentary candidate until approved as such by that party's National Executive Committee.

That Committee now has a pro-Corbyn majority, and ought therefore to resolve that it will never, under any circumstances, approve the parliamentary candidacy of Tony Blair.

Blair then needs to be asked live on air whether he would ever seek election as anything other than an official Labour Party candidate.

That is a Yes-No question, and any answer other than No is automatically expulsionable from the party, with a five year ban from even so much as applying to re-join.

While the NEC was about it, then it ought to suspend the membership at least of those Durham County Councillors who presented themselves in order to vote against the Teaching Assistants.

Based on that, Windlestone Hall, the Cricket Club, and the cuts to transport provision, the Leader of the Council, Simon Henig, ought to be expelled forthwith, and therefore made subject to the five year ban.

The forfeiture of his CBE ought also to be explored most actively. Let's face it, that would save time.

Being suspended or expelled, those people could not be Labour candidates in May, thereby potentially saving the party dozens of seats that such candidates would certainly have lost.

The Teaching Assistants, being council employees, cannot be council candidates. But their supporters include many people who not only could be, but in several cases should have been years ago.

The NEC can grant membership and candidacy on the spot in emergencies, and this is an emergency.

Alternatively, it can watch the devastation of the largest Labour Group in local government, taking the authority to No Overall Control while at least depriving the Leader of his seat before he lost his liberty.

Of course, as supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, the majority of the NEC's members may actively wish to see that outcome.

5 comments:

You are now on a mission to insinuate 1960s style financial corruption in the council and among its leading figures. Filthy politics, David, just filthy. You really want to avenge never being a councillor this badly? I pity you, truly I do.

He would deny it but he wants to beat the sitting councillor, the local political godfather as you probably know, even more than he would have liked to beat the guy who got that nomination instead of him all those years ago. In David's own mind, Ossie Johnson had promised him the seat years before. To this day he thinks he would have held it and Neil Fleming was a joke candidate.

Bloody hell, I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of you. Underneath the fine suits, the intellect and the bonhomie is something completely different. The best I can say is this, Corbyn and the TAs are both lucky to have you alongside them and not against them.

This campaign is going to expose some very important facts about David Lindsay. He is clever, energetic, charming, well read, well mannered, extremely well dressed. He has been seriously ill and he is now disabled but he carries on. All of that is true.

But he is not nice. A distinguished academic and churchman has never had an obituary in any academic or ecclesiastical newspaper. A local political rival's whole family have been branded racist thugs and that rival's promising political career has been ruined. We all know who is holding the coats for Oliver Kamm's lynch mob. Damian Thompson has been known to tweet about the fact that he was living in fear of his life. There are others.